The goal of Cityscape is to bring high-quality original research on housing and community development issues to scholars, government officials, and practitioners. Cityscape is open to all relevant disciplines, including architecture, consumer research, demography, economics, engineering, ethnography, finance, geography, law, planning, political science, public policy, regional science, sociology, statistics, and urban studies.

Cityscape is published three times a year by the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Making Mixed-Income
Neighborhoods Work for
Low-Income Households

James C. Fraser
Vanderbilt University

Robert J. Chaskin
University of Chicago

Joshua Theodore Bazuin
Vanderbilt University

Mixed-income housing policies such as Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, or
HOPE VI, are an outcome of historical processes that have limited the scope of subsidized
public housing in America, leading to disinvestment in government housing programs in
favor of reinvestment in market-based solutions. The underlying assumption has been that
reinvestment deconcentrates poverty and addresses other perceived failures of traditional
public housing. Although they provide some benefits to lower income residents, such initiatives
have not produced many of the outcomes for which their advocates had hoped. The
goal of this article is to reinvigorate the conversation about how, and if, mixed-income
housing policies can be implemented in ways that work with and for the benefit of low-income
populations. The article draws on literature about public housing and mixed-income
development to posit ways that mixed-income initiatives might be combined with
other programmatic efforts to foster upward trajectories for those experiencing poverty
and to create public housing environments where people can thrive in all aspects of their
lives. In the final section, we reimagine mixed-income housing in ways that could result
in more inclusive communities—a reimagination that we suggest may better meet the
original goals of such programs without dismissing the inherent limitations of solving
entrenched poverty.